


homecoming

by leftishark



Series: homecoming [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Asian American author, Japanese American Shiro, Non-Linear Narrative, Season 8 Episode 1 compliant, Shiro's backstory, but otherwise fuck season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 15:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18875695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftishark/pseuds/leftishark
Summary: Before the paladins return to space, Shiro spends his last day on Earth with his family.They stopped, and Shiro remembers that they were next to the persimmon tree, thick with leaves and strange green blossoms. Shiro thought maybe he had said something bad—maybe he wasn’t supposed to be an astronaut. But his mom just reached over and took him from his dad, settling him on her hip.“Shiro,” she said again, warm this time instead of scolding. “Takashi. You can be whatever you want to be.”His dad nodded and ruffled blunt front of his bowl cut. “Wherever you want to go, even if you want to go all the way to outer space, we’ll be with you, okay? Every step of the way.”





	homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> (edited 10/1/19 - the framing of shiro's name story)
> 
> here, take my soul

“It’s like you said,” Keith says. “You should be with the ones you love.”

“But I—you—”

He hasn’t said this yet. Neither has Keith, not since he faced death by Shiro’s hand.

Keith seems to understand, though. Of course he does. He smiles and clasps Shiro’s shoulder. “We’ll have all the time in the universe out there. Go. I’ll be here when you get back.”

So Shiro spends his last day on Earth with his family.

*

Shiro’s first memory starts in a hospital, but it’s not really about the hospital. 

He remembers the white walls and the bright lights and the doctor talking gently to his parents. He doesn’t remember what exactly they were saying; in retrospect, they must have been discussing his genetic test results, or maybe his mom’s. He was reading the magazine he’d brought in from the waiting room. _CALYPSO LANDS ON EUROPA!_ it said on the front, and he’d had to ask his dad how to say Calypso, but he could sound out enough of the words inside to get how cool it was.

He remembers the space magazine, and he remembers the purple lollipop the nurse gave him on the way out. But most of all he remembers when they got home and his dad scooped him out of his booster seat to carry him into the house, even though he was getting too big for that.

“Am I sick?” he asked. 

“You will be later,” his dad said after a moment, “but not for a long time. Not until you’re old like me.” 

Shiro grinned. “You’re _old_.”

“Shiro,” said his mom.

“I wanna be an astronaut,” said Shiro.

They stopped, and Shiro remembers that they were next to the persimmon tree, thick with leaves and strange green blossoms. Shiro thought maybe he had said something bad—maybe he wasn’t supposed to be an astronaut. But his mom just reached over and took him from his dad, settling him on her hip. 

“Shiro,” she said again, warm this time instead of scolding. “Takashi. You can be whatever you want to be.”

His dad nodded and ruffled blunt front of his bowl cut. “Wherever you want to go, even if you want to go all the way to outer space, we’ll be with you, okay? Every step of the way.” 

*

The Bay Area is devastated. The San Francisco skyline has been flattened to crumbs and wild growth, green from the first rain of autumn, has already overtaken the gray suburban sprawl Shiro grew up in. 

He descends to the familiar tract of Third World War era homes, boxy and plain from years when the history books say everyone stopped calling it the Cold War. A small crowd of neighbors has gathered in the street, a few of them familiar from his childhood but most of them new, and it hits him how rarely he visited home before he disappeared. His mom and dad rush toward him as he steps off the plane, and their faces break into matching teary smiles.

“ _Shiro!_ ” 

He wraps them into a three-way hug, wishing the prosthetic arm was physically attached so he could hold them fully. His mom is shaking in his left arm; his dad is squeezing tight around his ribs. Has he gotten taller in space—from Galra experimentation or years in weird gravity—or have they gotten smaller? 

“It’s really you,” his dad mumbles somewhere around his armpit.

“Really me,” he says. The words come easy now after so much practice.

“Let me look at you,” his mom says, pulling away to hold him at arm’s length.

He studies her back back, and his dad—they look the same but older, neither of which should be surprising, yet they both are. The same distinguished nose and eyebrows on his dad mirrored in his own face; the familiar sharpness to his mom’s features that’s slowly softening as her face thins and lengthens. They both wear age and war with dignity in the lines of their faces and the gray in their hair. 

Their eyes are roaming over him, too, taking in the scar across his nose and the white on his head, his detached robotic arm. His dad reaches up as if to ruffle his floof, but he stops short, running his fingers through his own hair instead.

“You look just like I did when I was younger,” Shiro says.

His dad laughs at that. It’s so good to hear his laugh. 

“You look cool,” his mom says. “Wasn’t it the fashion to have hair like that? Right before you left, I remember, everybody was doing white or gray, top trend of the year. I bet it’ll come back now.”

There was maybe one pop star who did. Shiro hasn’t truly felt how much he missed his mom until this moment. “I guess I should’ve brought bleach, too,” he says, gesturing to the storage compartment of his plane where he packed the supplies they asked for—building materials for repairs, mostly, some medicine and toiletries. 

“We’ll help you unload,” she says, but first she turns to the neighbors, beaming. “Our son, Shiro.” 

She doesn’t add “Captain of the Atlas” or “Hero of Earth” or any of the other ridiculous titles the press has been slapping on. He’s grateful for it. But the neighbors recognize his voice from the radio and his image from the fliers that have filtered in, even without the uniform, and they’re eager to shake his floating Altean hand. 

Shiro smiles politely as he fields questions about the arm and the war and space. He’s been looking forward to escaping the weight of symbolizing victory, but he also appreciates what survival means to people who have been through a war. 

Patience, he tells himself. 

*

Growing up with a latent disease wasn’t all that different from growing up without one. 

Shiro liked science and loved reading. His parents helped him with his homework and signed him up for tennis and karate and piano, none of which he was very good at, at first, but he kept trying until he was. After school he made up adventures with his neighbors, gallivanting through magical kingdoms and alien planets with gardening tools as props. 

When his mom had weekend clinics and his dad was swamped with class projects, Shiro got to spend the day with his grandparents. He liked going to the movies with Baba, especially when they got ice cream sundaes afterwards and she’d tell him stories of the good old days—and sometimes of the bad ones, of growing up in an internment camp. 

His favorite, though, was when Sobo and Sofu took him into the city to the Space and Science Center. They pretended their English was worse than it really was so that he would read the signs for them, eager to be helpful, and he paid extra attention at the planetarium show so he could tell it all back to his grandpa after he inevitably dozed off. 

It was a good childhood.

*

“Did you have lunch?” Shiro’s mom asks when they’ve taken off their shoes and set the boxes down inside.

Shiro is grateful for the opening; dozens of alien diplomatic meetings, and it’s his own parents that he no longer knows how to talk to. How are you seems grossly inadequate, and anything more specific would be crude. How have you been since you thought I died? Who else is alive? Have you forgiven me for leaving?

“A late breakfast,” he answers, “and I brought snacks.” He pulls the package out of his side bag to show them: some puffed juwar, an Arusian specialty gaining popularity at the market.

She peers at them in judgement before plucking out one of the crunchy lumps. At her approving hum, his dad pours a handful out too and tosses them back.

“Tastes like rice crackers,” his mom declares, and she goes into the kitchen to pull a bag of the Earth version out of a drawer. “I found a secret stash in your room. Those silica packets work pretty good, huh?”

“You were going through my sock drawer?”

“We cleaned up your room after they said—after.”

The house is suddenly too quiet. Shiro can almost hear the sunlight streaming in through the windows, shimmering, crackling—no, those are real claws tapping on wood.

“Another mouse,” his dad mutters.

“Better than the ants,” his mom says. 

“The house looks good,” Shiro says, looking around and grasping at positivity. Everything is as tidy as it always was, light couches and dark coffee table cutting clean lines through the living room. The intricate carving of a dragon, his dad’s masterpiece, sits on the mantle now instead of the table; a wood carp is there instead.

“We were lucky,” his dad explains. “There was a battle over Mount Diablo, right before they took us out, but all we got was a nick on the porch roof—thanks for bringing those tiles.”

“And the yard is all overgrown,” his mom adds.

“I’ll help,” Shiro offers, and he fends off their token protests that he didn’t come all the way here to work. “I want to.” 

His mom smiles, pleased. “There’s a box of your old clothes in your room. Don’t get these ones dirty; those are nice pants.” They are, both the material and the fit; Keith helped pick them out. 

Shiro pauses on his way up the stairs. The photo collages on the wall are the same as the last time he was here—on the left, every dorky school portrait all the way through his graduation at the Garrison; in the middle, pictures of his mom and dad together when they were younger than he is now; and furthest up, a collection from their family trip to Japan the summer before he started at the Garrison.

They’d visited the city relatives and the country relatives and he met too many to remember anyone’s title, even with the family tree his mom drew to explain her side of the family. No one seemed to mind; they just wanted to pat his cheeks and stuff him with all the local dishes. 

“You look just like your otousan,” everyone told him, looking between him and his dad, “but you have your okaasan’s spirit.” (And her ears, said the bolder aunties, shameless in old age.)

In the corner of the collage is a picture with his great-uncle whose diagnosis had shaken up the medical community and the generations below him: the first case of myotonic muscular dystrophy in an Asian person. It had been an explanation for his grandmother’s declining health, and an early warning for his mom and himself. 

Shiro had learned to think himself lucky to know what was coming. Lucky to be able to plan his life around the inevitable breakdown of his body. He’s lucky now to be alive at all. 

“Shiro?” his mom calls. He startles and moves on.

*

There were things that his parents said and things that they didn’t say. 

“Bring a jacket or you’ll catch a cold,” Shiro’s mom said often; then she’d scold him when he came down with a cough and make him honey tea anyway. She didn’t say, _I wish you would always be healthy._

“Great job on your timed test,” his dad said with a high five, but he never complimented his character.

“Work hard so you can go far in life,” his mom advised him, and didn’t add, _you don’t have much time_.

“Your mother loves you,” Shiro’s dad reminded him when their stubbornness put them at odds.

“Your father loves you,” said his mom said when Shiro rolled his eyes at his cheesiness.

Shiro can’t remember the last time any of them started that sentence with _I_. 

He used to say it back to them when he was little, when his mom and dad would trade off tucking him into bed. But as he grew out of childhood and into an awkward preteen, one of them fell out of the habit, and then all of them did. 

It wasn’t a big deal. By the time Shiro noticed, it was too late to change things without _making_ it a big deal, so he didn’t, and they didn’t either.

Still, Shiro knew that his parents loved him. They just said it in other ways. 

His dad said it in the dozens of pictures he took at each recital and every belt ceremony; his mom said it in the mural of the night sky she painted on his bedroom ceiling. 

They said it in fragments when Sobo and Sofu passed within a year of each other, and Shiro learned what death was: that it was leaving this world and not coming back. His mom’s hugs squeezed tighter and clung longer, and Shiro did his best not to pout about her absence when she spent long evenings on the phone with her siblings, tried to be brave. Still, his dad started reading stories with him again before bed, big-kid ones now that touched on loss and struggle and resilience. 

They said it in grief and they said it in joy, and they said it in the way they believed in him and his future.

One night when Shiro was sneaking downstairs for Halloween candy, he froze halfway down the stairs. In the quiet he could hear a soft scratching—his dad must be working on one of his wood carvings, and from this vantage point he could see a few candles lit by the window. His dad always said it put him in the right mood for antique crafts; his mom said it would ruin his eyes.

It was her voice that broke the quiet first. “I think the astronaut thing getting serious.”

“Astroexplorer,” said his dad. “That’s what he calls it now.”

“Astro-explorer. Six years he’s dressed up as an astro-explorer.”

“Yeah,” his dad chuckled, “and then there’s the books, the museums, the… everything in his room. Kids are like that; it was cowboys for me.”

“I heard the stories,” his mom said fondly. “This is different, though. It’s more. It’s like… like he has this light in him, and it shines so bright whenever he talks about space. Or even thinks about space.” 

Shiro did truly want to touch the stars, to explore the vast unknown. But every time he’d mentioned it to his teachers and nurses and on student-of-the-week posters, he’d been met with indulgent smiles that he knew were humoring a child’s impossible dream. 

His mom cleared her throat. “The Galaxy Garrison is testing kids in high school these days.”

“Honey, he’s ten.”

“And how long will he have to live out his dreams?” She sounded agitated suddenly like Shiro had never heard her before. “How old are those astroexplorers at the peak of their career, 40? My age? The doctors said it gets worse every generation, so who knows when he’ll start showing symptoms? What would _I_ have done if I knew I had this stupid disease when I was his age?” 

There was no scratching in the quiet that followed, just the dull clink of tools set on the table. “You couldn’t have done anything to become a better person than you are now,” his dad said in the soft sing-song he used when he said things like that. Shiro could picture his mom grimacing in embarrassment. “Tomorrow, let’s look into the Garrison’s requirements. Especially the physical ones, make sure they’ll consider him at all.”

“And if not…”

“Well. You’ve never met a mountain you couldn’t move.” His dad blew out the candles. “We’ll figure it out together. Shiro is gifted, or whatever they call it now, and he’s a good kid—he’ll be okay no matter what.”

A good kid, and here he was trying to sneak candy. Shiro turned and crept back up the stairs before his parents could catch him. 

Back in his bed, he stared up at the constellations painted above him, and he promised himself, and his mom, that he’d see them for real someday. 

Someday soon, before he ran out of time.

*

The day is sunny and warm, so Shiro climbs up the ladder leaning against the side of the house in just an old T-shirt from the box. His dad wanders off to start on the yardwork while his mom stabilizes the ladder from below and passes a hammer up to him.

“No more stimulators, hmm?” she observes. 

“For now.” He taps the curved tiles above the broken ones to push them up and away, then pulls off the broken pieces and the foil that was wedged under them as a temporary patch. “I still have to stretch this hand every day, and I showed my, uh, my friend how to do the neck massage, so he helps me with that now.”

“Mm,” she hums slyly. “Must be a very good friend.”

“Mom,” he groans, because that’s how these things go.

She chuckles to herself, but she leaves it for now. “But you’re doing better? How…?”

“Space magic,” Shiro deflects, exchanging the old tiles for new. It’s not a fair answer, though; when he glances down, he sees the curiosity, professional and personal, in his mom’s eyes. “They did something out there to… reset the clock, basically, and reduce the effects of space travel. Their medicine is pretty high tech, being star-faring aliens, and all. The Garrison doctors say it looks like they altered my epigenetics rather than the genes themselves. But the circumstances were unfortunate, and even if we knew how to replicate it, I don’t know that we should.” 

She nods. “That’s okay. Good for you. Glad you can keep flying and stay healthy.” 

It’s so like her, and Shiro wishes he could do more for her than the alien ointments and herbs he’s brought for her to try. “You look like you’re still moving well.”

“Today is a good day,” she shrugs. “Sometimes it’s not so good. Can’t tell if the MD is getting worse or I’m just getting old.” 

“You’re not old.”

“You said Dad was old when he was barely older than you,” she reminds him.

“Yeah, when I was three,” Shiro huffs. “No one under 10,000 is old anymore.” 

“Old isn’t so bad, anyway,” she continues as he fits the new tiles into place. “Americans think so, but they don’t know anything. You have to earn your wisdom.” She taps her forehead smugly. “And old people can still kick Galra butt.”

“Kick--don’t tell me you were fighting,” Shiro says, alarmed. 

“Not _fighting_ -fighting. But there’s more than one way to fight back.”

“Oh?”

“A doctor and her husband can go a lot of places to treat patients when the other side doesn’t know what’s a real human sickness,” she says. “Especially a disabled doctor, how could that be a threat? Of course I’m not going to coordinate people in the camp, or between camps, to cut off the Galra supplies and smuggle them out. Ha!”

Shiro’s impressed, though maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that his mom would take initiative like that and that his dad would support her. “You did all that?” 

She huffs, hands on her hips. “You think we just go along with those Galra after what they did to you? They took you away!” Her gaze traces over his scars and missing arm. “And who knows what else.” 

Shiro’s parents have always fought for his success; he had never imagined that they would fight for him in this way, too. “I—that’s. That means a lot.” 

“Well,” she says, awkward as always with statements like that. She passes him nails to secure the tiles.

“So you were a rebel doctor on Earth. That’s—sorry for the language, Mom, but that’s pretty badass.”

She grins proudly. “For a while. Then they figured it out and locked us up so we wouldn’t make any more trouble. They didn’t do anything really bad,” she clarifies when he looks over sharply. “They just made us useless.” And Shiro knows how that must have been its own kind of torture to the person who gave him the instinct to be helpful. “We were totally cut off, even the guards didn’t know when the war ended.”

“So that’s why I couldn’t find you,” Shiro realizes. “I heard they put most of the East Bay in the Central Valley to farm, but nobody could say where you were.”

“ _We_ didn’t even know where we were,” she says. “Ukiah, it turns out, middle of nowhere. Travel is hard for me now, took us a while to get out and then figure out how to contact you.” She holds the ladder while he climbs down. “If we couldn’t reach you before you left…”

Shiro sets the hammer down and wraps his mom in another hug. The sun is warm on his face; summer lingers well into autumn in these parts. “I’m here now.”

“Yeah,” she sighs, patting his back. She turns away when she lets go. “Okay, Shiro. Let’s go help Dad.”

*

Saying-without-saying was its own language of sorts, with its own syntax and semantics that evolved between them.

When Shiro came back for winter break his first year, he didn’t tell his parents how hard it was to be the youngest in the class by at least a year. He didn’t say how he missed his friends, how some of the bigger kids picked on him for being small, how he was struggling to keep up with math and physics that were beyond what his parents could help him with.

Instead, Shiro spent a solid half hour ranting about the cafeteria.

“You wouldn’t believe what they serve. Sometimes the mac-n-cheese is the only thing that’s edible at all. The worst is when they do Asian night! The tofu is bad, but the rice! How do you f—mess up _rice?!_ ” 

His mom refused to let the Garrison’s officer-only kitchens stand in the way of his well-being. Shiro learned to cook greens in a water boiler and curry in a microwave.

“You just have to think tricky,” she advised him. 

He helped her make a big pot of curry (on the stove, not in the microwave) for the annual Shirogane Christmas party, where she and his dad both made an embarrassingly big deal out of his new cooking skills to the distant family that poured in from all over California and, that year, Wisconsin. Between that and his mom’s humble-bragging about him at the Garrison—unsubtly dropping that he was the youngest student ever assessed, let alone accepted—Shiro escaped to the game room where all the cousins holed up for the day.

“Shiro’s the Champion!” his little cousins shouted when he won his fifth consecutive round of AstroRacer III. Shiro laughed and let them tug his arms up.

“I play video games for homework,” he grinned, half to deflect and half for the kids’ admiration. 

“You should play my girlfriend,” said one of his older cousins. “She’d whoop your—oh hi, Auntie!” 

Shiro wasn’t sure if the pinch to his mom’s mouth was about his cousin’s aborted swearing or the video game or the turkey wing on his own plate. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

“Shiro,” his mom said on the way home, and then, because she was being serious, “Takashi. Your cousins might be dating now, but they’re not trying to be astroexplorers. You’re not getting distracted with any girls, hmm?”

“Hah,” said Shiro, thinking of the revelation he’d had in gym now that all his classmates were older than him. The Garrison pushed them hard; everyone got really sweaty. “Yeah no, no trouble with any girls. You don’t need to worry about, uh, girls.” 

His mom’s eyes narrowed at him through the rear view mirror. “What about boys? No boyfriends until college.”

“But I’m not going to college, I’m going to space,” Shiro protested before he could think. “Uh, I mean—”

It wasn’t that he thought his parents would have a problem with it, since Auntie May came around for dinner in her lesbian T-shirts, but still. It was kind of personal.

“It was a joke,” his mom sighed.

In the passenger’s seat, his dad cleared his throat. “About college.” 

“About college! A bad joke about college, not about boyfriends. Boyfriends are okay, okay?”

“Okay,” Shiro parroted. His gaze fixed on the charm swinging on its red string from the rear view mirror. For a moment he wished its protective powers would fail. 

His mom turned onto their street. 

“But not for a few more years, you hear? Boyfriends or girlfriends. Or whatever. If you want to go to space, you need to stay focused.”

“That’s right,” his dad nodded. 

“You’re on your own over there, so you got to keep your own head on straight.” She paused. “Um, I mean—” 

And Shiro couldn’t stand it any longer—laughter burst out of him, loud and free. “Okay, okay,” he gasped. “I got it, Mom.” 

The next night, she brought out his favorite foods: shabu-shabu with every vegetable imaginable to dip into boiling broth, and a whole Costco pizza. 

“Shiro specials,” his dad observed unnecessarily. He went all out on his after-dinner fruit plate, arranging a lumpy rainbow of strawberries, mango, kiwi, and blueberries.

None of them said anything more on the subject, but the message was clear, and Shiro left home feeling warm despite the winter chill. 

*

Crouched between the kale stalks and the rose bushes, Shiro revels in the easy coordination he and his parents fall into, even after years apart. The three of them have always worked well as a team, him and his dad attuned to his mother’s natural leadership—and maybe what he sees in her is what everyone else sees in him, he realizes.

He’s pruning the overgrown roses down to their stubby trunks while beside him his dad diligently yanks weeds out of the soil. By the porch, his mom adjusts the hose draining the rainwater they collected.

They’re exchange stories now as they work, carefully curated to be entertaining rather than depressing, which are the majority of recent experiences for all of them. He learns about some of the characters in the camp and the prison, and he relives the lighter moments with his team.

“—a food fight!” he laughs. “They made us bond by throwing food goo at us, it was this awful green stuff—”

“Creative parenting technique,” his dad smirks.

Shiro snorts. “Pidge and Lance did call Coran our space dad. Allura—well, she’s a princess, so that’s different.”

“Lance is the blue one, right?”

“Yeah, but he flies the Red Lion now.” 

His parents exchange a look that says that they don’t get it and accept that they never will. “And Pidge…?”

“Green. She’s Sam’s daughter, but you never met her; she wasn’t at the Garrison yet before I left. She’s awesome—great with technology, really sharp, and she has a surprising knack for plants, too.”

Pidge and Colleen might like to see the garden, come to think of it. Shiro pulls his datapad out from his pocket and takes a picture of the reviving, half-weeded plants. When he opens the Paladins’ group chat to share it, there are already pictures from everyone else: a selfie of Pidge, Colleen, and Sam all making faces in the greenhouse; a more composed selfie of Allura, Coran, and Rommelle sharing a giant banana split; a competitively cute series of Hunk’s little cousins and Lance’s younger siblings; and interrupting them, a dramatic portrait of the space wolf looking over the desert canyons. 

He also has a private message from Krolia—a meta view of Keith taking the picture of the wolf. Shiro grins to himself as he turns back to his roses. 

“What’s so funny?” his mom asks. 

He doesn’t know how to tell them about Keith without telling them _everything_ about Keith, so he shakes his head for now, reaching for the last thread of the conversation. “Just thinking it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? How well the garden is doing, considering.” 

“Earth magic,” his mom says, wiggling her fingers. “Life will find a way to survive. Just like you.”

“In a way,” Shiro says, sobering. He’s really experienced the whole spectrum of life and death. Most of the time, he tries not to get caught up in the karmic calculus of it all. “I survived, but sometimes that meant that others… didn’t.” 

His dad pauses where he’s shoving the weeds into a black garbage bag. “You were in a war, and not one that you chose.”

“That doesn’t excuse it.”

“Maybe not. I don’t know how these things work.” His dad is quiet for a few moments as he finishes stuffing the bag, ties it up, and brings it to a sunny patch; the heat, Shiro knows, will kill the weeds inside. Then they can be composted. “Sam Holt reached out to us, back before the Galra arrived. He said you were alive, and he said that you were hurt but you kept on going. He said… you saved his son’s life.”

A snap judgement he made in desperation, following some instinct to _act protect defend._ “I tried, when I could. But I couldn’t always.”

“We know you, Shiro,” his mom says. “We know you did your best. You always do.”

Shiro wonders for a moment, though it’s not really the point, at how easily his parents speak in plurals, so secure in partnership, at least when it comes to him. The point itself sits awkwardly on his shoulders like ill-fitting suit. It’s the kind of thing a parent might say, but he wouldn’t have expected it from his. 

Maybe he’s not the only one who’s realized how precious the time is that they have together.

“Anyways,” Shiro says, “I’m vegetarian now.”

“I thought you were always vegetarian,” his dad frowns. 

By the persimmon tree, his mom snickers to herself. “Good, better for you. Shiro, cut some kale for me for our _vegetarian dinner_.” She prods a few fruits to check their ripeness and plucks one off. “Then come inside and help me chop.”

*

Two years into the Garrison, Shiro hit his growth spurt, and then everything else started falling into place. 

His sim classes finally progressed from basic drills to more advanced maneuvers, swerves and dives that sparked the excitement of a challenge. All the effort he’d put into struggling through equations built up his natural instincts into a physical intuition that the instructors called outstanding. 

And when he finally got to fly a real plane, it felt right like nothing else ever had. It was _fun_. Shiro felt free; he felt alive.

So he spent his summers working around the Garrison and saved up for a hoverbike of his own. He graduated early. He went home less. 

The distance allowed him to see the flaws in his parents, how his mom didn’t say she was hurt until a situation was beyond fixing, how his dad often talked to them like they were his second-graders. He kept some of their lessons and tried to unlearn others as he grew up away from them.

And he did grow up, socially, emotionally. Physically. Boys started looking at him. Sometimes, he looked back. 

Shiro was good in the pilot’s seat, great, even, but what ultimately made him excel was his ability to bring a team together. He was friendly with everyone, even if his friends were few, and he watched and listened and studied. He learned to read his teammates’ emotions and check in with them when they needed him to. He learned to recognize his own and push them aside. 

He learned that the most important things are the most difficult to say.

“You’re like family to me,” Sam Holt wept to him and the rest of the Europa mission’s crew over too many bourbons. 

“Love you guys,” the engineer agreed, thumping them all on the back, and somehow it was easier to say the words back to them than to say them to his own parents. 

It was easy to say them back to Adam, until it wasn’t.

Shiro was as prepared as anyone could be to give up flying at 50, at 40, at 35 when he was at his most pessimistic. He wasn’t prepared for 22. 

“Zero gravity has detrimental effects on bone density and muscle mass,” the doctors said when Shiro returned from his third mission with an orbital velocity record and stiffness in his fingers. “Your condition adds a higher level of risk, and there are signs that myotonia has been both triggered early and accelerated due to space travel.”

They gave him stimulators to help his hands relax, but there was little to do about the danger to his heart. 

The higher-ups started talking about “alternate career paths.” They invited him to outreach programs, tried to flatten him into a poster boy. Shiro resisted the schmoozing gigs with donors and politicians, but he genuinely enjoyed meeting the kids that shared his dreams of space. Kids like Keith. 

When Shiro applied for Kerberos, almost everyone tried to dissuade him. No human had ever spent that long continuously in zero-g, let alone with dystrophy. 

“The mission won’t be immediately fatal,” the doctors said, “probably, but it will almost certainly impact your mobility and shorten your lifespan. You may not be able to fly anything again when you return.”

Adam said no. Sanda said no. Keith understood that the decision was Shiro's alone.

Shiro didn’t need to ask his parents to know they would give him up to the stars with open arms, even as they hid their pain. They were the ones who had taught him to hide his. 

Between living and surviving, Shiro chose to live. 

*

“You two get out of my kitchen,” his mom says, shooing them out after he and his dad help her cut the kabocha. 

Shiro moves over to the couch to comply, but his dad chuckles and shuffles back in, muttering something about the tea he started. He’s always lingered in the background in the presence of Shiro’s mom, and Shiro used to fault him for that—for what he saw as a lack of presence and drive, too willing to bend to the will of others. But maybe he just never gave his dad a chance. 

Shiro looks around the living room while he waits for his dad to come back, taking in more of the subtle damage than he could before—chewed holes in the upholstery and cracks in the picture frames where they must have fallen. Still, it’s nice to sit down and rest. He’s used to long days of meetings and battle practice and gym sessions, but housework takes a particular kind of toll. 

There are only a few photos on display here, most of them by the stairs or tucked away in albums. He’s looking at the one on the bookshelf—himself as a toddler giggling and banging on pots and pans—when his dad comes back with a teapot and two cups on a tray.

“That was the day you became Shiro,” he says warmly. 

Shiro has been Shiro for as long as he can remember. His dad likes to tell the story.

“You were going through a babbly phase—a _very_ babbly phase—and we were all trying to teach you your name. But you wouldn’t say _Takashi_ back. You’d just giggle at us.” 

Shiro laughs, even though he's heard it a hundred times before; this time, it's refreshingly familiar. “What a little brat.” 

“Sometimes,” his dad grins, pouring him a cup of steaming tea. “You were staying with Baba, and she used to do this to me too, you know how she says your full name when she’s fed up but not really? _Takashi Shirogane_.” He puts his hands on his hips for emphasis. “For whatever reason, only Shiro stuck.”

“Kids,” Shiro muses, shaking his head.

“Yeah. And then you wouldn’t stop saying it. Except you couldn’t say the r, so it was a whole week of _Sheewo Sheewo Sheewo_.”

Shiro smiles into his tea and glances over to the shrine on the dresser, a simple arrangement of pictures of his late grandparents—both on his mom’s side, his grandfather on his dad’s—and an incense bowl. 

“Is Baba…?”

“She made it.”

“Knowing what she went through…” Shiro thinks back to the uncertainty that he would ever be free again, first in the arena and then in the astral plane. “It helped me through some bad times out there.” 

His dad grimaces in sympathy for them both, but thankfully he doesn’t ask for details. “I think it was killing her at first, to think that she might die like she was born, you know? An innocent captive in a war. But she pulled through—she’s always been a fighter.” He sips his tea. “Auntie May is staying with her now.” 

That, too, is a relief to hear, that the original gay of the family and, naturally, his favorite relative survived. He’s sure it shows on his face; his dad smiles before the lines on his face tighten.

“I’m sorry about Adam.” 

Shiro nods in acceptance. “It’s been so long, but I never thought… I never expected...” He sighs. “It still hurts.” 

“When we let someone into our heart, a part of them stays there,” his dad says, “even when the rest has gone.”

Before, Shiro might have rolled his eyes at such sentimental words. Now, he lets his face soften at their bittersweet beauty. He holds the tea under his nose to breathe in its refreshing calm and soak the warmth into his hands, and he turns toward the window where the setting sun casts everything in orange and red. The clatter and hiss of cooking fade away from the kitchen. His dad lets the quiet settle around them. 

A buzz from his datapad pulls him out before he can sink too deeply into thought, and Shiro looks down to a new picture from Keith. He recognizes the view looking west over the desert from the roof of the Garrison, familiar mountains and canyons in the distance. Keith must be watching the sunset, too. 

_Looking your way_ , the accompanying text says. It’s almost romantic, and Shiro’s heart squeezes at how Keith isn’t even trying to be; it’s just who he is with Shiro. 

Maybe he can tell his dad this much about Keith, he thinks. The most important part.

“Dad, I’ve found someone,” he says. More like he found me, he thinks, a thousand times, but his dad doesn’t need to know every grim detail of his journey.

“An alien boyfriend?” his dad jokes. 

“Hey, it’s been known to happen,” Shiro says. “But no—well, sort of. He’s from before, from the Garrison. I used to talk about him sometimes. You remember Keith?” 

“That kid who stole your car?”

Shiro nods, smiling at the memory. “He’s the Black Paladin now.” 

“Wow,” his dad says. “Well done, son.”

“He’s grown into the most incredible man,” Shiro says, unable to keep it in. “He’s brave and strong and loyal, and I can’t tell you how many times he’s saved me. He’s—everything to me.” As the words tumble out of his mouth he realizes how they might sound to a parent who’s given everything to their child. “Not that you’re not—I mean, you’re also important—“

“Shiro, it’s ok,” his dad says. “I know how it feels to be in love.”

Shiro freezes, eyes widening and cheeks warming. It’s one thing to feel how he feels and another entirely to hear those feelings named out loud.

“You are—?” his dad probes.

Shiro nods.

“And he—?”

Shiro hesitates. “I…”

“You’re holding back,” his dad says. “That’s not like you.”

“I’m not, I don’t deserve…” Shiro looks around at the suburban normalcy bearing witness to his angsty love life. “He said something once, but I almost destroyed him. I’ve caused him so much pain, and not just physically.” He meets his dad’s eyes. “I… seem to do that to the people that are most important to me.”

This—this is the reason he came. 

* 

“Mom,” Shiro said to his datapad, “you didn’t have to send me a Valentine’s day card again just because Adam and I broke up.”

He took out his box of keepsakes anyway.

“Can’t I send my own son something nice?” she said. “You’ve been stressed out with everything lately.”

She wasn’t wrong, but Shiro balked at being treated like he was fragile, at the possibility that he wasn’t fully capable of dealing with all of it. He felt sudden sympathy with Keith. “I’m not fifteen anymore, okay? I can handle it.”

He opened the lid. Staring up at him was the picture of him and Adam in their flight suits that his dad had taken at their official meet-the-boyfriend introduction. He’d tossed it in here in wave of misplaced longing right after the breakup, but now... 

He balled it up and tossed it at the little trash bin in the corner. _Score._

Then he sighed and walked over to pick it up. He smoothed it out and stuck it in the recycling instead. 

“Still there?” he said when he sat back down on his bed. Even with the upgraded connection in the officer’s quarters, calls still dropped sometimes.

“Hi, Shiro,” came his dad’s voice instead. 

“Hi, Dad. Sam Holt has some vintage prints he wants to give you when you guys come for the launch.” 

He turned back to the box. The next item was last year’s birthday card from Keith, handmade with an endearingly mediocre drawing of a hoverbike on the desert cliffs. He flipped the single sheet over. _Happy birthday, Shiro. Thanks for everything. Keith._

“About the launch,” his dad said. 

“Yeah?”

He put Keith’s card to the side and shuffled through the next few things—pictures from graduation, some grainy ones from the party that followed. A photostrip from when he and his friends went to the arcade in town. 

“There’s a dinner that night for the regional medical group. We’ve been planning to skip it for the launch, but we found out Mom is getting an award. Staff Service and Impact award for disability advocacy.” 

Shiro can hear her huffing in the background. “It’s one of those stupid corporate things. They ignore you for years when you’re just trying get flexible hours, and then they give you a plaque.”

Maybe it was corporate pandering, but she still deserved recognition. “That’s—that’s great. I’m sure it’s helping a lot of other doctors, too. You should go.”

All the way at the bottom of the box was a Halloween card from his first year at the Garrison. Why had they sent him a card for Halloween, of all holidays? A photo slipped out as he turned it around of him grinning in a tiny astronaut suit holding a pumpkin container. One of his front teeth was missing. Inside, the card read, _Soon it will be more than a costume. Keep it up, Shiro!_

“We could split up,” his dad suggests. “I can go to the Garrison.”

“No, you should be there for her.”

“But your launch—”

“It’s fine,” Shiro insisted. “You’ve made it to every other one. It’s not a big deal.” 

_Don’t treat it like it is_ , he didn’t say. _Pretend it’s not the last time I’m going up._

They had once said they would be with him every step of the way. And they’d been with him as far as they could go. He’d made it now; he could do this on his own.

“Are you sure? Don’t you want someone to be there?”

“I have friends, you know.” 

His dad sighed. “All right, Shiro. You can message us, right?”

“Video until Mars, photos until the asteroid belt, voice calls until Jupiter, text only the rest of the way,” Shiro recited from his training. 

“We’ll show your pictures to Baba. You be careful out there, okay? And have a great trip.” 

“Okay, Dad.” 

“We’ll mail you your engimono,” his mom said. “A frog this time, for your return. Very cute.” 

"I'm sure it'll keep us safe," Shiro said, covering his sarcasm in appeasement.

In the flurry of activity leading up to the launch, checking the mail center dropped off his list. He didn’t think about it again until he was in the spacecraft, and there was no lucky frog charm hanging by the pilot’s seat. 

*

“Dinner!” Shiro’s mom calls from the kitchen.

His dad clasps his shoulder as they get up from the couch, both a promise and a warning that the conversation isn’t over.

The three of them sit down the epic meal his mom has assembled on the kitchen table, full of vegetables Shiro recognizes from the garden. There’s a rolled omelet, bright orange kabocha, kale blanched and dressed in rice vinegar, and a block of cold silken tofu standing out starkly white against green onions and a black pool of soy sauce. 

“Don’t ask me how I got this,” his mom says as she scoops tofu into his bowl with a self-satisfied grin. 

Shiro has to close his eyes when bites into it. “Oh my god, I think I died again.”

“ _Shiro_ ,” says his mom.

“Again?” says his dad.

“Sorry, sorry,” he laughs sheepishly. “Ignore that. I just—I really missed this.” 

“I bet the aliens don’t do tofu this good,” his mom says. “Do they even have tofu?”

“The Olkari actually do have something similar. But I mean not just the food,” Shiro says, shoveling rice and vegetables in his mouth all the same before he sets down his bowl. “It’s good to be eating together again. I missed you.”

His mom smiles tightly. “We missed you, too,” she says. “Every day since you left, and then we thought… “

“We thought you were never coming back,” says his dad.

“And we didn’t even go to your launch to say goodbye.” She looks over at his dad, a sign of a well-worn discussion. “If we knew—” 

“—that I’d be abducted by aliens and thrown into an intergalactic war?” 

His mom doesn’t laugh, exactly, but something relaxes in her expression. “We should have been there,” she still insists.

“I should have been here,” Shiro counters. “When the Galra attacked and you didn’t even know they existed—and it was all because me, because of Voltron—”

“—Shiro—”

“—and we weren’t here, _I_ wasn’t here to fight back—”

“You did come back in the end,” his dad interrupts, gentle but firm, “and you stopped them. You saved the Earth. You can’t blame yourself for something you didn’t have any control over.” 

Shiro fiddles with his chopsticks where they’re laying sideways across his bowl. “Yeah,” he says to his rice, “I’ve had to learn that one already. But being back here and knowing what you went through… I don’t think I can stop wishing that I’d been here for you.”

“So you understand how we feel about the Kerberos launch.”

Shiro shrugs and picks his bowl back up. “I guess so.”

“Even when we thought nothing bad was going to happen and you’d come home safe and sound, we wished we had been there,” his dad continues. “Even if you didn’t need us there anymore. Unless… you didn’t want us.”

“I did—” Shiro sighs. “Of course I wanted you to be there.” 

“We were too much,” his mom says. “You were growing up. Growing out of us. We didn’t know how to grow up with you, except to watch you go.”

Shiro shakes his head. He thinks back to that time, when he was one mission away from his body forcing him into retirement. “It was like… I knew I was going to lose people, and I was so desperate to live for myself while I still could that I was pushing everyone away. With—with some people, I needed to, but not with you. I hurt you.” Neither of them denies it. 

“That was a long time ago,” his mom says. “It’s okay now.”

“You were under a lot of pressure,” says his dad. “For years.”

“I put a lot of that on myself,” Shiro reflects. “I thought it made me special, but it made me distant, too. But you always lifted me up, and I’ve never told you how much that means to me.” He smiles at his mom, and then his dad. “You gave me the universe.” 

“You earned that yourself,” his dad says, pride written all over his face.

“Well, we did help,” his mom says with one of her little grins.

It’s in the words they say and don’t say and on their faces and in the energy between them. It always has been. Though his heart is pounding irrationally, Shiro feels both the need and the strength to push past the mental barrier that has always stopped him before.

“I love you,” he says, and the words feel at home on his tongue even though it’s the first time he’s said them in years, the first time they’ve heard them from him in many more. Something he didn’t know was tight in his chest begins to loosen. “Both of you. So much.” 

“We love you too, Shiro” his mom says without hesitation. She blinks, looking awkward but pleased, like she doesn’t know what to do with these words now that they’re out, and reaches for more pumpkin.

“We both do,” his dad agrees. “All we ever wanted was to show you.”

Shiro thinks of the wounds he’s inflicted over the years, a thousand infinitesimal ones left untended. “I didn’t always deserve it.”

“It’s not about deserve or not deserve,” says his mom. “You’re our son, of course we love you.”

He’s never thought about it that way. The simplicity stuns him. 

“Love isn’t always easy,” his dad says, “but it doesn’t have to be so complicated.” He’s looking at Shiro steady and purposeful, and Shiro suspects that he isn’t just talking about familial love between parent and child. “You don’t get to choose who loves you, but what you do about it—that’s up to you. You have to let people into your heart. And if you do, you can build something beautiful together.” His gaze flickers over to Shiro’s mom. “Neither of you earns or deserves that. You choose it together.”

“You always deserve anyway, Shiro,” his mom insists. “You deserve the most.”

His dad nods. “You are our everything.”

Shiro’s eyes water and his smile wobbles, all the tension of the day bleeding out at once. It’s one thing, again, to know and another to hear this truth in words, to be assured that he means something good to his family. Any unconscious doubt he’s ever held evaporates into simple affection, and he feels lifted and held as if by a cloud.

He knows, though, what it means to have everything and to lose everything. In less in an hour he’ll go back to the base and in less than a day he’ll be galaxies away from Earth.

“I’m leaving again,” he says before guilt can twist back into his gut.

“You’re leaving, but you’re not leaving us,” says his dad. “That’s who you are, Shiro. You’re an explorer, and you’ve made the stars your home.” He looks over at Shiro’s mom, soft and full of affection. “It makes us so proud that you’re out there doing good for the whole universe.”

“Makes us feel better knowing that you have someone out there taking care of you,” his mom adds, her eyes knowing as Shiro flushes. “I knew it! I heard you two talking about him. Keith, right?”

“We take care of each other,” Shiro amends.

His mom smiles. “That’s the best kind of love.”

*

On Kerberos, Shiro told himself he was content with how far he’d gone, the farthest any human had been from Earth. 

He messaged his parents just before he and Sam and Matt left the ship. 

_Drill is set up, breaking ice soon._  
_Out here, the sun really is just a star._

It was the last thing he said to them before he was captured, the last words they exchanged until weeks after the war ended on Earth. 

The Paladins were out of the medical bay by then, and everyone at the Garrison was working around the clock to prepare Voltron and Atlas to launch the offensive. Sendak’s forces had obliterated the modern communications systems; old tech was how Earth beyond the military was slowly reconnecting.

“We heard your speech on the radio,” his mom explained shakily, her voice tinny but unmistakable through the same. He could picture her and his dad holding each other through their audible sobs. Shiro’s tears didn’t come until after the call. 

“The Holts said you were out there,” his dad said, “and we tried to help, but then the Galra attacked—no one knew what was going on—"

“I tried to find you,” Shiro said, thick with the guilt of not trying harder despite everything he had done. “I didn’t know where—or if you were even—"

Before they could start catching up, though, Iverson’s bark came over the intercom calling all Atlas crew for an emergency drill.

“That’s me,” Shiro groaned.

“You have a big launch coming up,” his dad noted.

“Yeah, it’s—there’s so much to do, all the time. I’m sorry. Really. I want to talk to you.”

A pause, and then:

“Come home, Shiro,” his mom said. “Just once before you go.” 

And so he started clearing the day before the launch.

*

Shiro insists on washing up after dinner. It’s the least he can do to care for his parents in the short time they have together. 

He scrubs the pots and thinks of love and family, of loss and home. Of the web of people—human and alien and both at once—who care for him in their own ways, sprawling from Earth to faraway galaxies. He’s lucky to be alive, and what makes that all the better is that he is loved. That he loves. 

His thoughts, as they often do, gravitate to Keith. This unspoken thing between them has felt fragile, like the wrong words or even the right words at the wrong time will send everything crashing down. But Shiro thinks now that he’s the one that’s been uncertain, not the bond between them that’s been growing stronger since long before he thought to test it. 

Maybe his thoughts have some cosmic power: when he dries his hands and checks his datapad, he has two more pictures from Keith. The first is not of him but of Lance posing on Black’s snout in an outlandish outfit of pots and pans; then there’s a selfie of the two of them. Lance is holding the camera and grinning broadly, and Keith has an adorably grudging smile. It warms Shiro to see him happy. 

“This is Keith,” he says, walking over to the couch and showing the picture to his parents. “The one with the, uh, regular clothes.”

“He’s beautiful,” his dad approves, his mom humming in agreement. 

“He is,” Shiro agrees wholeheartedly. Body and soul. And as good as it is to be with his parents, Shiro is eager to return to him. 

There’s one more thing he needs to do, though, before he goes. He pulls a small transmitter from his bag by the door. 

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he says, hiding the _if_ and knowing they’ll hear it anyways, “but this time, we can stay in touch from almost anywhere in the universe.”

He shows them how to connect their datapads and a few troubleshooting tricks. They take it in pretty well for parents. 

“Thank you, Shiro,” his mom says, her eyes crinkling warmly. “We have some things for you, too.” 

She presses a sturdy paper bag into his hands. Inside is an assortment of food: dried persimmons and the almost-ripe one picked today, tea, the rice crackers from earlier. Shiro pulls out a jar of little seeds.

“Black sesame for healthy black hair, white sesame for white hair,” his mom explains.

“If you say so,” Shiro smiles, endeared.

His dad picks out a small wooden figure from his work table, looping a string through the top to make it a charm. Shiro vows to put it up in the Atlas as soon as he gets back.

“The turtle is heaven and Earth together,” his dad says, “so we’ll be with you in your travels.”

He looks over at Shiro’s mom before he continues.

“And this is for your Keith.” _Your Keith_ , Shiro’s heart echoes. 

His dad holds out a narrow form wrapped in cloth. Shiro suspects what’s inside, but he lifts the edge to check—and yes, it’s one of his wood carving knives.

His mom places her hand over both of theirs before his dad can hand it off. “It’s bad luck to give a blade as a gift.” 

An old superstition, that a sharp edge represents cutting off the relationship between the giver and receiver. But Shiro thinks of how Krolia had given Keith’s father her blade and lost him, how Keith’s father had passed the blade to him and—

Better not risk it.

He rummages through his bag and pulls up a coin to exchange for the knife—useless on Earth, given that Puig is a different quadrant altogether, but the giving of it is what matters.

“Thank you for all of this,” Shiro says. “And for today. I’m glad I got to see you and—and come home.”

His dad pulls him into a goodbye hug. “You will always have a home wherever we are.”

His mom is next. “You will always be our Shiro.”

*

When Shiro’s parents dropped him off at the Garrison the first time, his dad pulled him aside, sensing the nerves dampening his enthusiasm.

“You’ll do great,” he said. “I know you will.”

“You did it,” his mom said beaming proudly at his first launch, a routine servicing mission to the Mars station that would put him in the record books nonetheless. “Now go be great.”

Shiro gets a message from them while he’s flying back over southern Nevada. 

_Keep on being great, Shiro. We love you._

*

Keith is waiting in Shiro’s room when he returns. He looks up at Shiro—not carefully, but with purpose, like he does everything else he cares about. “How did it go?” 

“Good,” Shiro says, letting everything coalesce into a few simple words. “Really good. I didn’t know how much I needed to see them. And... how much they needed to see me, too.”

Keith stands up from the armchair and touches his elbow as if in passing on his way out. “That’s great, Shiro.” 

“I have something for you,” Shiro says before he can go, “from my parents. Well, mostly my dad.”

Keith’s eyes zero in on the carving knife when Shiro presents it, and he runs his hands over the handle and blade with the focus of someone who recognizes craft. “It’s beautiful,” he murmurs. “A tool for art instead of war. Thank you—to them, too.”

“Technically I’m not supposed to just give it to you,” Shiro admits. “Bad luck.”

“So what do we…?”

“A payment, or a trade. You’re supposed to give me something, too.”

Keith looks up at him through his bangs, and for a wild moment Shiro thinks Keith is going to kiss him. But he reaches into his pocket instead and places something small and hard in Shiro’s hand.

“I got this for you anyways,” he says quietly. The rock bears the orangish red of the desert it came from, dotted with little blue-green flecks. It’s beautiful.

Keith is beautiful. The way he holds Shiro’s gaze so steadily and yet so softly pulls Shiro to him like gravity. The whole day has been an emotional triathlon, wearing down his walls until there’s nothing left to stop him from baring his soul.

“I told my parents something that I should have said a long time ago,” Shiro starts, “something that I need to tell you, too. But I don’t mean it the same way with you; I don’t mean it in a family way, exactly. Not a—not a brother way.” Shiro sees the moment that Keith realizes what he’s talking about, his eyes going impossibly wide, and he could lose himself in their depths if not for the words that are simmering just under his skin. “I mean it in every way. Keith,” he says, full of warmth and longing and hope, “I love you.”

Keith’s face—collapses, but before Shiro can doubt his words, Keith flings his arms around his middle and squeezes tight. 

“I know you do,” Keith says, low and intimate in his ear. “But you can't imagine how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.”

“Then I’ll say it again.” Shiro pulls back to press a kiss to the dark bangs over his forehead. “I love you.” The scar he left on his check. “I love you.” His lips, parted and waiting. “I love you.”

“I love you,” Keith breathes into his mouth, and Shiro knows that here, too, he is home.

**Author's Note:**

>  _frog_ in japanese sounds like, and is a [symbol](https://www.thejapaneseshop.co.uk/blog/japanese-symbolic-animals-meanings/) of, _return_.
> 
> many thanks to dr_paladiknight and verity for their feedback, ideas, and encouragement, blue for his thoughts on disability, and everyone who's followed along. 
> 
> writing this has meant so much to me, and i would absolutely love to hear if it resonated with you--comments mean the world to me, no matter how long it's been, or drop a kudos <3 i'm on twitter [@leftishark_](https://twitter.com/leftishark_) <3
> 
> this fic goes out to everyone who loves shiro; to my fellow queer asians, especially those in diaspora; to my (not-lesbian) auntie may, may she rest in peace; and to my uncle. i wish you'd had someone like shiro when you were growing up.


End file.
